I think you might find political consultant Louis Perron’s advice to the Biden campaign at RealClearPolitics interesting. Here’s a snippet:

On paper, and judging by official numbers and indicators, the economy is doing fine. Large parts of the electorate, however, do not feel the Bidenomics (yet). What should he do? Blow his own horn and propagate that the economy is doing well, or showcase how he feels the pain?

The answer depends on timing. The more time there is available, the more an incumbent should fight to change the public perception and mood. After all, an incumbent president or prime minister has a unique ability to affect the media. This, however, has to be done very carefully, in the right tone, and in sync with where people are emotionally at the current moment. For Joe Biden, the main opportunity to do this starts with the State of the Union speech, and the window of opportunity will close at the convention. After that, he will be left with step number four.

That is, vulnerable incumbents need to go on the counter-offense and rip apart the challenger. As different as they may be with respect to policy, this is the strategy by which George W. Bush and Barack Obama won reelection. The rationale goes like this: You may not like what you have, but at least you know what you have, and the alternative is a big risk, and it’s likely that things will get worse. In that respect, Donald Trump is a gift from heaven for Joe Biden, and it’s noteworthy to me that Biden purposely and consistently makes it a point to run against Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.

I suspect that the Biden campaign will find some of his advice extremely difficult to accomplish, particularly his advice about mobilizing the base. The problem is that the interests of different components of President Biden’s base, e.g. white suburban college-educated voters and urban black voters, are diametrically opposed. IMO some of the base is expendable while some is not. So, for example, for President Biden I (along with Ruy Teixeira and John Judis) think that he doesn’t need to reach out to white suburban college-educated voters but does need to reach out to urban black voters. That is further complicated since those who contribute to or work in campaigns tend to come from the former group so it necessarily looms larger than it should.

I’m not much of a sports fan but I did watch yesterday’s Super Bowl off and on. I thought it was a more exciting game than I expected and Patrick Mahomes is a great quarterback.

By and large I found the ads, something that many people tune in to the Big Game to watch, fairly ho-hum.

The half-time show demonstrated to me how out of touch I am with contemporary popular music. All I can say about it is that it was certainly high energy.

I also wanted to take note of this piece by Ray A. Smith in the Wall Street Journal. Businesses see great potential (I think excessive potential in the large language model artificial intelligence (LLM AI):

Decades after automation began taking and transforming manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is coming for the higher-ups in the corporate office.

The list of white-collar layoffs is growing almost daily and include jobs cuts at Google, Duolingo and UPS in recent weeks. While the total number of jobs directly lost to generative AI remains low, some of these companies and others have linked cuts to new productivity-boosting technologies like machine learning and other AI applications.

and

That includes managerial roles, many of which might never come back, the corporate executives and consultants say. They predict the fast-evolving technology will revamp or replace work now done up and down the corporate ladder in industries ranging from technology to chemicals.

“This wave [of technology] is a potential replacement or an enhancement for lots of critical-thinking, white-collar jobs,” said Andy Challenger, senior vice president of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

and

Meanwhile, business leaders say AI could affect future head counts in other ways. At chemical company Chemours, executives predict they won’t have to recruit as many people in the future.

“As the company grows, we’ll need fewer new hires as opposed to having to do a significant retrenchment,” said Chief Executive Mark E. Newman.

with this the crux of the article:

As AI adoption grows, it is likely to reconfigure management hierarchies, the Oliver Wyman study projects. Entry-level workers are likely to bear the initial brunt as more of their duties are automated away. In turn, future entry-level work will look more like first-level management roles.

The cascading effect could flatten layers of middle management, the staging ground for senior leadership roles, according to the analysis.

More than half of senior white-collar managers surveyed in the study said they thought their jobs could be automated by generative AI, compared with 43% of middle managers and 38% of first-line managers.

but, sadly, I think this is wishful thinking:

Still, business leaders across the economy say they expect the new technology will augment and elevate some white-collar roles, giving employees and managers the means to do more meaningful work—both for their companies and in their careers.

At Prosus, a global technology-investment group based in the Netherlands, executives say that is already happening as AI automates more of its workforce’s tasks.

“Engineers, software developers and so on can do the work twice as fast,” said Euro Beinat, Prosus’s global head of AI and data science. “One of the side effects is that a lot of these employees can do more and do slightly different things than we were doing before.”

Prosus’s web designers, for instance, used to ask software developers to do the coding. Now they can do it themselves, Beinat says. Meanwhile software developers can focus more on design and complex code. It is “a seniority boost,” he said.

at least in the United Stats because I do not believe that businesses have ever operated that way before. What they have done is eliminated junior-level positions to save costs without recognizing that juniors become seniors. Basically, they will pull up the ladder that they’re standing on.

One more word of warning from what I’ve heard as “Murphy’s Law of Computers”. A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as twenty people working twenty years. Lately, I’ve been using ChatGPT on a regular basis and I think it has improved my productivity significantly. But I have the ability to distinguish between the garbage results that it produces and the good ones. That takes a certain amount of knowledge and expertise.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune remark on President Biden’s Thursday of last week:

Reasonable Americans don’t see Biden as a malicious or nefarious man because he’s not. But they do see him as having some worrying cognitive issues because, well, that’s clear to everyone except perhaps the president himself. Even in the one news conference of his career where it was crucially important not to confuse one political leader or country for another, Biden was unable to pull that off. For those of us who have had difficult conversations with angry, elderly parents over driving or living circumstances, it was especially painful to watch.

and

That said, the report raised legitimate and troubling concerns about Biden’s careless and self-serving handling of those classified documents.

We were not fond of how Biden blamed staffers at his hastily arranged news conference. We think there is palpable hypocrisy in how Democrats amplified, and crowed about, Donald Trump’s trove of classified material sitting around at Mar-a-Lago when Biden clearly was doing much the same thing a few hundred miles to the north.

Sure, Biden cooperated with the special counsel whereas Trump huffed and puffed and obfuscated and obstructed, which is a material difference here. But that’s analogous to whether or not you cooperated with a police officer who pulled you over for speeding. It’s a good idea to do so, and will be taken into account, but it doesn’t mean you are innocent of the offense.

concluding:

Clearly, Democrats have a problem with their nominee, which explains tweets like “Pritzker/ Whitmer ’24” showing up on Friday morning. The only solution is Biden vanquishing any and all doubts through his cognitive performance over the next few weeks. That won’t be easy for him. But only he can fix this situation.

Special Counsel Hur’s explanation of why he did not charge President Biden may well have had partisan motives. In the body of the editorial the editors describe it as “sly”, “brutally effective”, and “rhetorical masterpiece for the ages” but none of that is relevant to the basic question of the president’s mental acuity.

In his Washington Post column Marc Thiessen asks

If the president is “struggling to remember events” during his “painfully slow” interactions with others, how can he effectively conduct diplomacy or make decisions on matters of peace and security?

There are wars raging in Europe and the Middle East; U.S. forces are under attack in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea; the risk of war in the Pacific is growing; and rising numbers of people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list are trying to slip into the United States by illegally crossing the southern border. And apparently the commander in chief dealing with these overlapping crises is a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

We’re now beyond concern about whether Biden is fit to serve a second term; we should be concerned about whether he is fit to finish his first.

while CNN quotes James Carville:

The fact that Biden isn’t doing the Super Bowl interview and probably won’t debate, says James Carville, “that’s a sign your staff doesn’t have much confidence in you.” And while it’s “never too late” to change candidates, “the later it gets the more confusing the process gets.”

I cite these not as proof of their truth but as corroboration of the point I have been making. Damage control by the president’s surrogates is unlikely to succeed and, as Mr. Carville also observes, the president’s age and mental acuity aren’t going to improve over the next four years. I can understand that President Biden was outraged by the, to the eyes of partisans, gratuitous remarks of the special counsel regarding his age and memory but he still should never have given Thursday’s snap press conference.

One of the things that struck about the news this week was the sharp contrast between spin and reality. The spin on the failure of the immigration reform bill to pass the Senate was that Donald Trump’s call for Republicans to reject the bill and was purely politically driven. Was that the reality?

My understanding of the bill was that it allowed 2 million migrants into the United States, a combination of “asylum seekers” (5,000/day X 365 days), “gotaways”, and unaccompanied minors before requiring the president to take any action. The counter-spin is that it “normalized” the status quo.

Lost in the spin and counter-spin was whether it was the right policy or not. I do not think it is the right policy and I will give just one, simple example of why it is not.

Here’s the history of what are called “housing units” (homes plus apartments) in Chicago over the last 20 years:

or, said another way, the number of housing units in the City of Chicago has remained unchanged over the period of the last 20 years. The number of migrants entering the country has been 1-2% of U. S. population per year for the last several years. To house those people the number of units would need to increase at that rate. They are not.

That doesn’t even include the reality that the trend has been to reduce the number of what are blithely referred to as “affordable housing” with much more expensive housing units. To accommodate the present rate of migration we would need to reverse that trend and build millions of unit affordable to the people who are moving here. That would cost billions, possibly trillions.

Consequently, accepting the number of migrants we have been is unrealistic.

This morning I listened eagerly to the talking heads programs to see the direction that spin would take following President Biden’s lousy snap press conference last week. It was pretty obvious that the position the Democratic huddle had arrived at was premised on what I think is the reality of the 2024 president election. If the election is a referendum on Biden, Biden loses; if the election is a referendum on Trump, Trump loses.

Why do I say “Democratic huddle”? Because so many of the Democrats being interviewed were using precisely the same wording to a) defend President Biden’s mental acuity and b) contrast President Biden with Donald Trump. My own view is that James Carville’s comment pretty much said it all: President Biden’s demurring from being interviewed prior to the Superbowl illustrates a lack of confidence in his mental acuity that no amount of defense will overcome.

The usual format of my posts is

1. I quote a news article, op-ed, editorial, or another blog post
2. I comment on it
3. I give my own opinion

I’m going to deviate from that in this post. I’m going to give my opinion then quote another post, then comment on it.

I think that Israel, far from being the 51st state, is another country with a different culture than ours and whose interests are not perfectly aligned with ours. It is a liberal democracy but only remains one by virtue of disenfranchising a significant number of those who should be its citizens but aren’t—the residents of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s interests are more closely aligned with ours than those of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Qater, Jordan, etc. but not by a lot. I think the appropriate relationship between the United States and Israel is to maintain a respectful distance.

Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 was an atrocity and Israel has a right to defend itself. Other than that statement we should not align ourselves too closely with Israel and the position taken initially by the Biden Administration was too close. Now it is apparently trying to distance itself somewhat from Israel, something it would not have had to do in the absence of that initial mistake.

In a recent post at outside the Beltway James Joyner, commenting on Israel’s war with Hamas, remarks:

A horrific war is about to get uglier. But, as much as world leaders urge restraint, Netanyahu and his war council clearly believe this is what’s necessary to achieve their incredibly challenging objective of destroying Hamas once and for all.

Recent remarks from Secretary of State Antony Blinken strike the right balance:

The brutality of Hamas attacks on Israel, he said, cannot be used to justify brutalising Palestinians.

“Israelis were dehumanized in the most horrific way on October 7,” he told a news conference in Tel Aviv. “The hostages have been dehumanised every day since. But that cannot be a license to dehumanise others.”

“The overwhelming majority of people in Gaza had nothing to do with the attacks of October 7,” Mr Blinken went on. “The families in Gaza whose survival depends on deliveries of aid from Israel are just like our families. They’re mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, who want to earn a decent living, send their kids to school, have a normal life. That’s who they are. That’s what they want.”

But translating that into foreign policy is another thing. The administration has made it clear that it will not condition military aid to Israel.

President Biden is in a particularly tough spot here, as he has fully embraced Netanyahu, to the consternation of many of his own staff. But urging “peace” and “restraint” is to little avail absent an end state that’s acceptable to Israel.

The emphasis is mine. James, like Sec. Blinken, is dodging the hard questions about the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The overwhelming majority of Japanese people had nothing to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nonetheless, we killed between half a million and a million Japanese civilians in our war with Japan. That was because we understood that we were at war with Japan. Not the handful of samurai families who promoted war with the United States. Japan.

Similarly, Hamas has been the elected government of Gaza for nearly 20 years. Israel has had no presence in Gaza for most of that period. Since electing Hamas there have been no elections in Gaza but there has been no widespread resistance to Hamas in Gaza. Opinion polls taken after October 7 show majority support for Hamas and other violent radical Islamist groups among the residents of Gaza.

How do you make war on Hamas without making war on Gaza? I don’t see it. How do you give the full-throated support to Israel the Biden Administration has without supporting war on Gaza? I don’t see that, either. That full-throated support was an “own goal” by the Biden Administration which they are desperately trying to escape.

Those are the hard questions about the conflict between Israel and Hamas. What if all of the adult residents of Gaza support Hamas? What if the majority of adult residents of Gaza support Hamas? Does it make a difference? How do you make war on Hamas without making war on Gaza? How do you make war against irregulars embedded within a civilian population without killing civilians?

I think that Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 was an atrocity, Israel has a right to defend itself, and I deplore every single death or injury of any civilian in either Israel or Gaza. Full stop.

Update

The commenters at the linked post continue to misunderstand what “proportional” means in this context. It means proportional to the risk not proportional to the original loss. Since Hamas has promised to repeat the attack on 10/7 again and again, the risk is the extermination of all of the Jews in Israel.

Michael Reynolds does make a good point, asserting than an end to U. S. support would unleash Netanyahu to engage in even greater attacks on Palestinian civilians. That could be the case. If true it might cause me to change my view which is that we shouldn’t provide aid to Israel. However, I’m skeptical that what we do or do not do has much effect on Israel one way or another.

I stumbled across this article at Yahoo News by Orianna Rosa Royle and it touched on so many recurring themes here that I just had to pass it on. Here’s the situation:

“This is the most humbled I’ve ever felt in my life,” a teary-eyed Gen Z graduate reported back to her TikTok fans while holding a stack of résumés after a disappointing day of job-seeking—and the brutal wake-up call has struck a generational nerve.

In the video, which has amassed over 23 million views, Lohanny Santos, a 26-year-old from Brooklyn with a dual degree and three languages up her sleeve, shared that she’d been going door-to-door to find work to no avail.

but then you dig a little deeper:

After her online venture didn’t generate enough income to pay the bills, she went into several coffee shops to hand them her resume—just like she did when she was 16 and was looking for a job. But it wasn’t long before the Pace University graduate realized that not even “two degrees in communications and acting” is enough to land a $16-an-hour job in New York in the current tough job market.

“It’s honestly a little bit embarrassing because I’m literally applying for, like, minimum-wage jobs,” she cried. “And some of them are being like, ‘We’re not hiring’ and it’s like, ‘What?’ This is not what I expected.”

“This sucks,” she concluded.

and this gets to the crux of the matter:

Just last month, 27-year-old Robbie Scott similarly went viral on TikTok for insisting that Gen Z isn’t any less willing to work than generations before. Instead, he said, they are “getting angry and entitled and whiny” about the prospect of having to work hard for the rest of their adult life, only to “get nothing in return.”

“What’s sh-tty is, we’re holding up our end of the deal,” Scott said. “We’re staying in school. We’re going to college. We’ve been working since we were 15, 16 years old…doing everything that y’all told us to do so that we can what? Still be living in our parents’ homes in our late twenties?”

How in the world can this be happening when the unemployment rate is 3.7%? Let’s decompress this a little. Jobs today fall into several categories:

• Low-skill jobs that must be done in person. Wages for such jobs are under pressure from constant immigration and have been for thirty years.
• Jobs that must be done in person, are licensed and require credentialing. Some of the jobs in this category pay very well indeed but require specific skills and training and are frequently quite constrained in number.
• Jobs that can be done remotely and require the ability to read and write in English but not much else tangible. Wages for those jobs are under pressure from offshore and have been for thirty years. What’s worse those jobs are about to fall off a cliff in the form of large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI).
• Jobs that can be done remotely, frequently require a college degree, and require skills and often credentialing in some specific disciplines, e.g. web development. Those jobs, too, have been offshored for decades. There are nearly as many people in India with college degrees as there are people in the U. S. Entry-level jobs in this category, too, will be under pressure from LLM AI.

Now let’s consider this young woman’s situation. The jobs she has been looking for are in the first and third categories and, frankly, she’ll never be able to make a decent living doing them. Her degrees are non-disciplines. Acting and content creation require talent, drive, and, realistically, looks but not a college degree. That has been true for a century or more. Her two degrees are useless. For the jobs that must be done in person, she’s competing with large numbers of immigrant workers and for the jobs that can be done remotely she’s competing with everyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection. I wish her good fortune and her TikTok post will probably help her but I don’t envy her.

There are strategies which could mitigate the problem but they’re wildly unpopular because each of them gores somebody’s ox.

Yesterday evening I was surprised, as I suspect many were, by a snap press conference conducted by President Biden in reaction to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s decision not to prosecute him for mishandling classified documents. Although it may have been intended as damage control on the FBI’s report’s remarks on the president’s comportment and, particularly, his memory, I am not sure he accomplished that objective. Indeed, he may have accomplished the opposite. Today I expect that the president’s surrogates will fan out to perform damage control on the damage control.

IMO the press conference was an error. What I believe should have happened is that the president should have made a brief statement praising the FBI for having arrived at the right conclusion (not prosecuting him), contrasting himself with Donald Trump, and that’s all. He should not have answered questions.

Here’s my question. Did the president help himself or hurt himself in the press conference?